Applications emit metrics that allow users to monitor the operation and health of the application. These metrics may comprise historical information regarding the function of an application, such as the type and number of operations performed or the amount of memory or processor resources consumed. The metrics may be used as a self-assessment by the application in order to keep the application up and running.
The metrics typically comprise a number of dimensions or tags. An enormous amount of data may be collected by the metrics. Many different combinations of the metric tags are possible. As a result, it may be difficult for users to sort through the metric data to identify the most relevant and useful information.
Existing user interfaces allow users to drill-down linearly through metric data. For example, users may be shown a total number of requests associated with an application. Drilling down into the requests may show the user a list of each type of request and the number of times each request occurred. Drilling further down may show the user the time each request occurred. Information about other metrics is selected separately.